Issue 170 of the popular Linux Format magazine compares Gentoo with the other obvious "power user" distros: Arch, Debian, Fedora and Slackware. These things are very subjective of course, but the author's choice of distros to compare is sensible: those are the big distros for GNU/Linux power users, with different emphases on customisability, simplicity, stability, and bleeding-edge technology. Gentoo comes out on top overall

Fedora is the "cooker" for RHEL releases. As such, it has an air of authority that causes vendors to either directly offer support or at least make sure things don't go south. This is especially true for whatever version of Fedora that RedHat uses as a snapshot when they produce a new release of RHEL.

That being said, the Fedora community only supports the current and previous releases of Fedora with patches and bugfixes. If you do any sort of work with the US government, you may have noticed of late that they hate versions of an o/s that are no longer supported with updates since that makes things vulnerable to exploits that arise.

There's the rub... The gov'vies only like it if you stay current, but Fedora cycles between being an absolute train wreck (ie right after an RHEL snapshot) and something reasonable. So at some point your choices are staying with something with no support and thus at risk of being shutdown, or some POS version that can barely install itself (looking at you Fed18)

fedora is a total pos distro that you have to be an absurd linux ninja to manage. gentoo is a piece of cake compared to it. they need to make "red hat" a penguin with a fez in all reality, no dependency management, whats the point of package management. might as well build linux from scratch at that point. slackware does RPM's too. slackware has other goodies like slapt-get & .tgz package management. id drop fedora, and insert linux from scratch.

Just wondering. What makes Fedora a "power user" distro? I've never used it myself, thus the question. I've used RH in past, though.

If you're keen to try the latest heavily bleeding technologies before they make their way (or don't) into the Red Hat family (RHEL and its free clones), Fedora is the way to go. Though I agree with the others in this thread: it's a poor choice for anyone other than an EL pro who wants to play with stuff prior to its EL release, because its own release cycle is way too fast. By the time you sort out its problems and get a decent working desktop set up, the *@#$ing thing will be unsupported.

I rather detest the adjective "power", along with "turbo", unless the latter refers to the turbocharger on an internal combustion engine, or other use of a real, physical turbine. I might grant "Turbo Pascal" legacy status, but that's about it.

I'm not sure that "Military grade" or "government grade" is a good thing, in my experience it means whatever changes were last made had to snake through a maze of red tape which could take months if not years before it becomes official which makes it somewhat not up to date_________________A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Issue 170 of the popular Linux Format magazine compares Gentoo with the other obvious "power user" distros: Arch, Debian, Fedora and Slackware. These things are very subjective of course, but the author's choice of distros to compare is sensible: those are the big distros for GNU/Linux power users, with different emphases on customisability, simplicity, stability, and bleeding-edge technology. Gentoo comes out on top overall

I rather detest the adjective "power", along with "turbo", unless the latter refers to the turbocharger on an internal combustion engine, or other use of a real, physical turbine. I might grant "Turbo Pascal" legacy status, but that's about it.

Heh I totally agree with you in general. But the phrase "power user" does have some relevance to Computing, ime. It's useful in HCI to categorise users into "beginners", "users" and "power users", and to tailor help, documentation and sometimes options to that audience. We all start off as beginners, and most software we don't spend a lot of time with, even when we do know it well enough.

It just has very different meanings according to context. Eg in Office software, a power-user is usually one who does a lot of macros, and customises them. In Linux distros, I think it depends on the distro more nowadays. But for the people running the distro, I think a power-user is someone who provides patches, which more and more means to the build-system, not the underlying software. In Gentoo, it's more likely to indicate programming experience, in line with how things used to be when you just had debian and slackware, since there tends to be so much more interaction with the source.

I don't agree with changing the UI, personally: I think the same UI should be there for all, and the most you do is provide a checkbox to show more detail. However it's still useful to categorise the user: a beginner with your software will appreciate tips about common situations. Someone who's used it quite a bit will find them irritating.

To my mind, just do so transparently and provide a config option that's easy to override, which is exactly what a more experienced user should know how to change. We tell the beginning user how to do so in update, and there are mentions of the config file path /etc/update in several places. There's also two config options, one about being new to update (intro=1) and one about being new to Gentoo (novice=1) as we're wrapping the package mangler.

Having said all that, it's probably better in GUI software to start (as an app, running for the user for the first time) assuming the user does not know the software, and providing a switch-off per-hint or per-dialog/area, with the basic options showing and the usual tree or checkbox to show more detail.

The people designing it are still going to think in terms of beginners, users and power-users though: certain operations and settings will simply make no sense to someone who doesn't know the software. For instance, update has support for tinderboxes with saveTmp, a stronger variant of saveLog, and custom error handling functions that the installer or end-user can define to run whenever a package fails, or when it fails and there is a regex match within the last user-specified NN lines of log. They were added in response to requests (they're not things I use personally, apart from the built-in libErrCheck which used to be the only error-handler allowed) but 95% of users will never be interested in them, and only 1% will ever use either (figures taken out of thin air;) I would class both as "power-user" options, custom error-handling as "expert-user" since it needs knowledge of Gentoo, build-logs (and what goes on in them) and update itself.

If you want to be cynical think of "power-user" to mean "won't complain if it breaks, but will help to get it working." ;)

I'm not sure that "Military grade" or "government grade" is a good thing, in my experience it means whatever changes were last made had to snake through a maze of red tape which could take months if not years before it becomes official which makes it somewhat not up to date

Welcome to every server/"enterprise" focused distro ever.

Good for servers and workplaces, bad in most cases of modern desktop use.

fedora is a total pos distro that you have to be an absurd linux ninja to manage. gentoo is a piece of cake compared to it. they need to make "red hat" a penguin with a fez in all reality, no dependency management, whats the point of package management. might as well build linux from scratch at that point. slackware does RPM's too. slackware has other goodies like slapt-get & .tgz package management. id drop fedora, and insert linux from scratch.

Where would Arch or Debian land? And LFS is really good if you're serious about learning Linux as well.

Just wondering. What makes Fedora a "power user" distro? I've never used it myself, thus the question. I've used RH in past, though.

If you're keen to try the latest heavily bleeding technologies before they make their way (or don't) into the Red Hat family (RHEL and its free clones), Fedora is the way to go.

If you got the patience to fix your machine constantly, and deal with constant breakages, there's Rawhide to mess with. However if you do test Rawhide, I recommend testing it in a virtual machine because it does break constantly.

On the Debian side, Sid has the newest stuff for that distro, and actually, it's pretty stable for a development branch too. Just came across an Aptitude break when I last updated my Sid VM though.